August 8, 2025

Boom Town

"Boom boom boom boom, I’m gonna shoot you right down, right off your feet. Take you home with me. Put you in my house.”

Anniversaries so often fly by once you’re a certain age. We’ve belted through the twentieth¹ anniversaries of all of the first revived series of Doctor Who, and thus the debuts of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, in something of a haze this year. Which is how I missed the twentieth anniversary of the episode of Doctor Who, the title of which you’ll find at the top of this email. This is the eleventh episode of the 2005 series of Doctor Who, which was something I’d intended to mark in this newsletter, for reasons that I hope will become clear as we go.

By this point in the 2005 season I had just about got used to Doctor Who being back. The commission of two more seasons and two more Christmas specials was already months in the past. We were all in this for the long haul and having seen most of the season, we could all be 100% confident we were in the safe hands of Russell T Davies and his team for the foreseeable future. On the night of The Empty Child I dared leave the house on the day of transmission for the first time, on the night of Boom Town I did so again.

By this time, the midnight BBC Three repeat of the series was well established. Which meant that even if I got stuck in an unfeasibly long queue at the Post Office, or trapped by a landslide, I’d probably get back home in time to watch Doctor Who on transmission. Long before proper catch up services, let alone streaming, “on transmission” felt like a very important thing.

That Saturday, a friend of mine was doing a Doctor Who book signing in one of the many Doctor Who themed shops named after Hartnell stories that littered the nation.² As I waited for my fried to finish signing books, I overheard a child who was looking at other merchandise say that “There’s an old monster coming back this week”. Their excitement was palpable, and I involuntarily and immediately rethought a bunch of assumptions I didn’t know I had. That Doctor Who had a child audience was, ten weeks into the revival, still something that took some getting used to. But to see them thrilled by the idea “an old monster” was something else again.

That’s not because I’d gone mad and decided that this meant that night’s episode featured the Zarbi or something.³ I wasn’t one of the people so spoiler-free that I skipped the trailers appended to each episode, and so I knew that Annette Badland’s character “Margaret Blaine” (Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen) was coming back. Was something introduced a month before “an old monster”? Sure, why not. It was a then strange new world, that had such people in it.

As I stood around in that shop, and later looking for Chinese food, I worried about not seeing Boom Town, but I wasn’t worried worried. It’s not quite the bigotry of low expectations, but following Moffat’s instant classic, and while anticipating what we guessed would be both a Dalek and a regeneration story, Boom Town seemed as close to disposable as the all new Doctor Who might ever be.

We know now, but didn’t know then I think, that Boom Town was a replacement for a story by Paul Abbott, which didn’t go ahead. We did know, or at least could intuit, that it was, if not “the cheap one” then “deliberately inexpensive”. It’s not just that huge amounts of it take place in the TARDIS console room, the series’ only standing set. Or even that the rest of the episode is filmed on location in and around Doctor Who’s home studio, but set in that city and in the present and thus requiring much less than normal in terms of on-location building and dressing. That’s not going to be cheap, even in 2005, but it is going to be cheaper than the episodes either side of it. You know, the WW2 one and the Dalek epic.

But you can flip that around too; Davies has spoken of a laudable desire to use the series to show off Cardiff as itself. To make Cardiff be a setting as well as a set for Doctor Who. I’d never had much of an opinion on Cardiff. It was somewhere I’d driven past to see family in Pembrokeshire. But Boom Town made me want to see it. Twenty years on, this is still Doctor Who’s most Cardiff episode and watching it now makes me want to go back there.

Director Joe Ahearne doesn’t make Cardiff look beautiful, he demonstrates its beauty, and it has never looked better on television. It’s in the way the sun bounces off what we’d soon come to call Torchwood, and around the rest of Cardiff Bay. A sort of visual love letter to the city that had become Doctor Who’s home (and hopefully still is).

Bouncing through that living set are an unimpeachable regular cast, all of whom get loads to do, all of whom do it perfectly. There’s a little scene where Rose and estranged boyfriend Mickey discuss someone he’s been seeing in her absence while they look at the bay, and it’s tiny and human and perfect, and both actors are perfect in it. Eccleston is constantly turning on a sixpence throughout, from his eye rolling at his friends’ antics to the terrible weight he brings to the discussion of “Bad Wolf”, which is then itself turned around into a joke. A note too, for how joyous Captain Jack Harkness can be at his peak, his interactions with all other characters just the right side of obnoxious, even his flicking a “Whatever!” sign with his fingers.

In interviews, Quentin Tarantino developed the theory of “the hang out movie”. A film you’d watch just to spend time with its character, like they were your friends. Boom Town is at times like Doctor Who’s hang out movie. This Doctor, Rose, Mickey and Jack? As a gang they are so fully formed, their interactions so pure. It feels bizarre this is really the only time they exist as a unit. Just for this 45m. When I could watch them forever. Forever. But of course, some people, very reasonably, can’t watch them at all. Not now.

Revelations and accusations concerning two of the actors to play them have soured many people’s ability to watch any story featuring either, and we should not disregard nor gainsay that reaction. It remains startling that, twenty years on, arguably the only repeatable-without-controversy Ninth Doctor episodes are The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead and Father’s Day. But casting issues are another, accidental moral complexity loaded onto a story that is already full of deliberate ones.

On Doctor Who Confidential Davies once spoke of the Doctor’s decision to order “Steak and Chips!” as him knowingly disregarding the New Adventures novels’ decision to make his vegetarianism something more than a couple of jokes. An omission aimed at making Doctor Who seem “hearty” and mainstream. But it also fits so well at the top of a series of conversations about death, and moral responsibility for it feels like he has to have known. The Doctor’s casual disregarding of a moral question many humans have, before diving into ones many people have not really considered is perfect.

In this conversation, as we all know, Blon interrogates the Doctor’s own lifestyle, questioning his morality and comparing it to hers; the “We’re not so different you and I” story that, done properly, always works when played out between long running hero characters and complex villains.

This is a story that works best with the Eccleston Doctor, the traumatised survivor, played by the actor as if his character has PTSD in a performance that still after decades can occasionally steal the breath. His scenes with Badland sizzle. As great an actor as Billie Piper unequivocally is, she was also astonishingly young in 2005. Barely older than the episode is now. Actors, whatever their natural ability and training, learn by doing and experience leads to gravity.⁴

In Badland, like with Simon Callow a few weeks before, Eccleston is spending time face to face with a performer who can return any serve he makes, and unlike Callow Badland had been under utilised in her first appearance in Doctor Who 2005. That’s not something that’s repeated here, and she’s extraordinary. You believe every flick of her eyes as the two of them talk. As they “banter”. As they correct each other, argue and even flirt. And they talk about ideas of moral culpability, of what might constitute a “necessary” death in a cause, and about the alleged hypocrisy of the Doctor, having captured Blon in the middle of an attempt to commit mass murder, taking her back to Raxacoricofallapatorius where crimes she had already been convicted of will see her then put to death.

I have often seen it said that Boom Town is “about” the death penalty. But that has never seemed to me a supportable reading. In Britain, the death penalty has not really been a live political position, beyond a lunatic fringe, in my lifetime. What was, in 2005, a point of anxious debate in Britain was what could or should be be done with people convicted of crimes (and who were demonstrably a danger to the lives of innocent people in Britain) if another nation asked for their extradition to face trial there too. Especially if that nation itself had the death penalty for crimes of which they were accused.

People such as, to pick an indicative example, Abu Hamza al-Masri, a British Muslim cleric arrested in 2004, and who was a bete noire of the kind of tabloid newspaper we briefly glimpse in Boom Town. Racists blamed Hamza’s ethnicity or his religion or the form his religion took. But there was no credible disputation of actions.⁵ Like Blon Slitheen, he was kinda proud of it and alternated between that a kind of equivocating solipsism. I don’t mean to say that Blon is an analog for Hamza, or that the episode is “about” him. Just that it’s a product of a time when he and other people in similar positions were in the news.

I felt (I still feel) that to extradite someone to a place where they may face judicial death is wrong, because judicial death is in and of itself wrong. That the whole point of inalienable human rights is that they are inalienable⁶ and have the have to extend even to the inhuman and the not-human, let alone the inhumane. Does Blon deserve to be put to death? Not if you believe no one does.

Can Blon be allowed to carry out her own murderous plans? Can she be contained? Not really. Do her other victims and their representatives have a right to their own justice? Yes. But what if our ideas of justice conflict with theirs It’s a great crashing against each other of things that Western liberalism is perceived to do well - and it’s not as if the country that Hamza faced extradition was one wildly incomprehensible to the Britain in which he lived, it being the United States.

It’s this that's the real meat of the episode. The steak for which the chips of the Rose / Mickey relationship drama and Captain Jack’s shenanigans is exactly the right accompaniment. Not the arguments about the morality of the Doctor’s adventures. That’s a quandary that has, if not easy answers, then answers that can be arrived at. They’re about motivation, and the Doctor’s unselfishness and desire to save lives versus Blon’s selfish motivations and lack of interest in the fates of people who get in her way. The extradition debate is entirely different.

I won’t rehash or reengage with the arguments made in the episode here. You’re far better off watching the episode itself for that. I will say that while Blon’s arguments are made not in the service of others, let alone broader principles, but in order to defend herself, doesn’t alter the efficacy of some of them. More, just because she asks questions in bad faith does not stop them being pertinent.

We would later discover that, before his decision to become a religious warrior, before a change in lifestyle and expressed attitudes that left many who knew him utterly perplexed, Hamza had been a “party animal”, a keen consumer of mood altering substances (both legal and illegal) and someone known for mistreating women. He was, in short, a different kind of abuser. One who seemingly believed and was motivated by different things, but who behaved, it seemed, remarkably similarly in a number of ways.

The problem with Hamza in the end, it seems was not his ethnicity nor his religion, but that he was a certain kind of abusive man. The fault lay in his own nature, perhaps. (We might ask if the question of Blon’s villainy is a matter of nature, nurture or Nietzsche, and then very reasonably be slapped for taking things too far.)

In the half decade that followed this story online Doctor Who fans would delight in accusing Davies of “using ‘deus ex machina’ endings”, over-employing a term they’d probably read on the dread TV Tropes and couldn’t have translated or defined if you’d trapped them in a Cardiff restaurant and demanded they do so over steak and chips.⁷ But the genuine deus ex machina ending of Boom Town, which is almost literal, and derived perhaps in part from The Edge of Destruction (1964) of all things, is a wholly appropriate ending for the drama of which it’s a part.

When the TARDIS opens and spills a kind of heavenly light over Blon, returning her to the state of an egg, it’s the only possible way for the story being told to end. A moral debate without possible resolution is ended without fudging resolution and by divine intervention of a sort. This is in keeping with the drama from which Davies is drawing, and which as an English literature undergraduate he would inevitably have at some point been told he should read.⁸

Margaret’s return to innocence is a kind of god-given grace, very different to how Hamza’s religious journey simply altered the surface of the kind of bastard he was; and the Doctor’s quick assertion that she can “start again” the closest we get to a conclusion in a story that’s smart enough to know there are not easy answers to the questions it raises and perhaps not answers at all. Okay, we are conflating multiple, conflicting notions of the divine here, but it’s a proper use of the deus ex machina, not least because The Eumenides is about the need for judicial process and means “the gracious ones”. The dea of that play is Athena, whose arguments in favour of non retributive justice transforms the Furies (Erinyes) in the Eumenides of the title. Athena’s grace is a justice freed from violence, which is exactly what the TARDIS provides.⁹

We know now that Davies planned to have a child Blon appear briefly in The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End, as a demonstration of how much nurture played a role in who she became, but other things got in the way. It’s not too late to do something else with these ideas and such a wonderful performer. Twenty something years on might even be perfect timing to go back to Boom Town’s many complexities and a performer as capable of engaging with them fully as Annette Badland.

In 2025 Cardiff is at least two economic crises on from the punning Boom Town of this story’s title, but the episode itself remains, for me, one of the richest Doctor Who stories of all. You learn, writing about Doctor Who, to “never say never” albeit in a different sense to how that cliche is usually employed. You shouldn’t say “No one ever says Boom Town is their favourite Ninth Doctor story” because someone will quickly produce a fanzine or Outpost Gallifrey post in which someone did. But nevertheless, “No one ever says Boom Town is their favourite Ninth Doctor story”. But I think it might be mine.

Would I take it to a desert island? Perhaps. I would take it to Cardiff on DVD. In fact, I have.